It is not an easy time to be a Unix server vendor, but at least it has stopped getting harder.
According to the latest statistics from the box counters at IDC, worldwide sales of Unix servers was flat as a pancake, growing four-tenths of a percent to hit $3.8bn in revenues. That drops Unix from about half of revenues a decade …

COMMENTS

Bad stats?

Personally, I find it's often cheaper to buy a Windows server and un-install Windows before popping a Unix OS on there. Probably related to the server distributors receiving a payment for each Windows box they ship. Not sure how that affects the statistics.

erm no.....

Andy 18,

Working at said Server disty in a very large server franchise (HP) - we don't pre-install any OS unless its specifically asked for prior to shipment...and the servers don't come from the vendor pre-installed (again unless specifically asked and paid for).

Sounds like someone has fed you a line to get you to pay for a Windows license maybe........

GNU

Linux/Windows

I'm not supprised that big Unixes are not doing that well, I know of a few big companes who are dropping their RISC based big Unix systems (Solaris/HPUX/AIX) in favour of virtualising everything on Linux VMs, sharing their VM host machine with Windows VMs. Often this is augmented by z/Linux on z servers. The bang for buck of the big Unixes is dropping off very fast and is much less than is available for Intel boxes these days.

Well yes.. but

you have to remember that just staying flat actually means that a hell of a lot of more capacity have been shipped. POWER7 for example gives you around 4-5 times the CPU capacity for the same money, and SPARC and Itanium have at least doubled.

Surely

For practical reasons, yes.

Probably could use POSIX as an umbrella term for all Unix and Unix-like systems. The Unix separation mainly comes from:

- UNIX being reserved for "genetic UNIX", those commercial systems are based on SysV.

- The BSDites, that have weird things in their rc.d/init.d files and use the fugly /dev/ttyXX everyone else stopped using since the Unix98 PTY spec came out

- The "Unix-like" OSen, of which Linux is the most known. Some purists insist to call this GNU/Linux, and the same purists will go up in flames if anyone were to call Linux "Unix".

In reality, the GNU OS was never finished. Linus built a kernel and put the GNU tools over that, thus the GNU/Linux controversy began as GNU thinks that Linus Torvalds only built the kernel and thus didn't really make a full OS from scratch. Meh.

Posix

The problem with Posix indicating Unix is that if you install SFU on Windows, it becomes 100% (IIRC) Posix compliant. I wouldn't say that this made it a Unix box though, in the same way that if you sitck Wine onto a Linux box it's not a Windows machine.